Problem with mobile hard drives

We have some mobile hard drives that our sister company sends us with data in it. Now they use the drives that can be accessed by fire wire. That is fine because all our computers have those kind of ports. There is one computer which cannot open those drives. When I connect to the port, on the task bar it shows me that an external device is connected but when I go to My Computer, the drive is not there.
When I connect it to another machines, it works just fine which tells me that it is the machine and not the drive. Although the drive shows up in the Device Manager under Disk Drives. There are 2 fire wire ports and both are a problem. I was thinking maybe it is not getting enough power, so I disconnected all the usb ports except the mouse and keyboard, restarted the machine but no luck.
What do you guys think could be the reason?

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Comments

kevozz

Does the drive show up in Disk Management in the Control Panel and does it need to be initialized? (doubt it but just a guess)

dadaji

Yes, it does show in the Disk Management and its healthy (no need to initialize).

Plantwiz

dadaji wrote: »

We have some mobile hard drives that our sister company sends us with data in it. Now they use the drives that can be accessed by fire wire. That is fine because all our computers have those kind of ports. There is one computer which cannot open those drives. When I connect to the port, on the task bar it shows me that an external device is connected but when I go to My Computer, the drive is not there.
When I connect it to another machines, it works just fine which tells me that it is the machine and not the drive. Although the drive shows up in the Device Manager under Disk Drives. There are 2 fire wire ports and both are a problem. I was thinking maybe it is not getting enough power, so I disconnected all the usb ports except the mouse and keyboard, restarted the machine but no luck.
What do you guys think could be the reason?

Could be a few different things...

-Have you confirmed the particular drive you cannot use on this machine DOES work on another machine?
-Could be a bad USB port or block of ports
-The port could be blocked due to a policy
-Confirm the port is active in BIOS
-Maybe the drive or the cable for the drive is bad?
-IS this port USB1.1, USB2.0?

and as I'm re-reading your post...
Are YOU using Firewire or USB?

You mention the other company uses Firewire. However, you mentioned you disconnected all USB devices minus the KB/M...so now I'm not certain what you have so that I can make recommendations for you. Please clarify.

Which OS are you using?
Are all the machines the same?
If not, what two OSs are being used?

Plantwiz

And check the MFG site for the external drive and look for a driver and/or firmware update. Maybe the one drive has older firmware?

dadaji

Thank you Plantwiz and I will try to clarify.
- The Firewire port is the problem and not the usb.
- The sister company sends different Firewire drives but they all work on other machines except on one.
- Most of the machines that I have tried this drive are on Windows XP SP3 except my personal which is Windows 7.
- The port is active in BIOS and I forgot to mention that the firewire drives used to work on that particular machine and suddenly it stopped. No hardware or software changes had been made on that machine.
- I have used a different cable and a different drive.

Windows is updated and the drivers for the drive are up to date.

Hope this answers your questions.
Thank you again.

estamand

if it shows up in disk management, have you tried to assign a drive letter to it?

I'm assuming it shows that it is partition and formated (fat32/ntfs)?

tiersten

Look in event viewer.

dadaji

Nothing in the Event Viewer. No errors, no warnings regarding this issue.

Plantwiz

It's possible that particular machine has a failing/failed Firewire bus.

Depends on how much time you want to invest in troubleshooting...but

- you could add a PCI-Firewire card and see if that gets you up and running.
- Are these machines ones you built? Or are the MFG machines (Dell, HP, etc..) If you built it - check the Mobo mfg for updates or problems with the port. If MFG - check warranty as well as known issues.
- Can you share the drive on a working machine to this one as a work around?

Aside from the OS, are all your machines the same? You stated yours is W7, but are the other 3 systems the same model?

Is there any reason the permissions on this one system are locked/different from the other systems?

- Do you have any other firewire equipment/devices you could test on this port? Camera, scanner, etc..

dadaji

Thank you for the reply.
The machine is built in-house and it is 3 - 4 years old.
I can install a Firewire-USB card but I will have to order it and I don't know if the Manager wants to do that.
Also, the machines that I tried this mobile drive are identical. There are no permissions on this machine that is locked/restricted for this user. Even if I log in as administrator on that machine, it does the same thing.
No, I don't have any camera or scanner that is Firewire supported to test on this machine.
I don't want to spend too much time but I would like to know the reason/solution to this problem for future purposes though.

Asif Dasl

Flash the motherboard BIOS or buy a firewire card (eBay if necessary)